


dare its deadly terrors clasp

by aerialbots



Series: tyger tyger [3]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Bedtime Stories, Gen, Mythology - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-06
Updated: 2017-12-06
Packaged: 2019-02-11 13:15:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12936066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerialbots/pseuds/aerialbots
Summary: What few people still remember him, after, call what he became Nightstalker: the one who hunts monsters in the dark.





	dare its deadly terrors clasp

**Author's Note:**

> A little coda for the series, aka the story both Nightstalker and Prowl chose their names from.

They tell a story of creation after the dawn of the world, the first ages just past and the planet settled into spinning as it would until it unravelled with its last spark. War hadn't been discovered yet, not in the sense we know it; war meant fighting forces bigger than yourself, gods making spears and playthings and examples out of mortals. If you were fortunate, they did not choose you for it. There were still very few to choose from, though, back then. 

Mantle wasn't fortunate. Mantle was all dark chromatophores and knowing gaze, too many memories of protecting those he loved. 

He got chosen. 

He could fly and he could protect, but these things are bigger than mortals, and for him to have a fighting chance he'd have to not be one anymore. 

He died, of course; the chosen always do. What was born from the sparking husk that used to be his self was bigger and faster and stronger, something new and unknown. Darker than dark, a gaze that knew too much -- far too much to let monsters live. 

He remembered little, if any, of his past self, and it didn't make much sense: fragments of gentle things swept away by rebirth, bits of crystal buried under the weight of an awareness of exactly how to hurt and kill and destroy, a far more detailed methodology than the intricacies of kindness. He remembered enough, though, to know there were things bigger than him, not in size but in importance, things that were once precious to someone he'd never be again, and now seemed even more fragile than before. Smaller things, kinder things, need to be kept safe, after all, and he knew how to fight. It was the reason he was chosen. 

He died again, obviously, because the chosen always do: this is why nobody who knows enough wants to be chosen. If death were ever a kindness, however, it was probably his own; he remembered too much, little as it was, nameless and nebulous and painful as only loss could make it. 

This is how it went: he hunted the monsters, chased them one by one, out towards the dark, and when at last he wasn't enough (because that’s what they never tell the chosen: that even after that first death they might not survive), he fell back onto the delicate things that not even death could erode from him, nameless and nebulous and too dear to ever forget. He swept the monsters into a dance, relentless towards the stars, deadly spins with nothing to lose and too much to have lived for, drawing them further and further from what he could've had, could’ve still been. 

And then, in one last clash towards the sun, they were devoured and burnt and gone.


End file.
